The plant whisperer

[Jeff], fully acknowledging his inability to keep plants alive, has designed a system to help him out a little bit. The “Plant Whisperer” monitors water levels and notifies him if the plant needs attention. Actually, it notifies him either way. The plant whisperer uses real time text to speech to say one of several pre-programmed things, either proclaiming its happiness or requesting more water. He’s using a parallax propeller for the job as he says it is capable of handling the real time text to speech. We realize this is overkill, but we absolutely love it. The only improvement we would want would be to possibly use a pre-recorded voice for more clarity. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

@foxy
“After the break” refers to the page break. It just means that you have to click through to the full post to see it. Putting more content behind page breaks is a easy way to get people to spend more time on your site, and ideally, load more ads in their browsers.

That said, I think it’s an annoying term myself. I don’t know why exactly, as it technically isn’t wrong, it’s just one of those things that bothers me.

I love this idea. This plant is pretty lucky to have this much devotion lavished upon it.

My only minor issue would be that the synth voice is almost completely incoherent in some of those samples, although that may be due to the common problems of uploading videos to the interwebs. I too think sampled voice samples would be better – even if it’s just a recording of a higher-quality synth voice – I mean why not? :)

Jeff. I hear/read plants and such actually are affected/enjoy being talked to. Surprised no one else has mentioned it but you might also reverse your logic and have the device also soothingly talk to the plant..just an idea/observation!

Great Idea, have you thought about adding a self-watering system for when your on vacation? Since it monitors the water level it’s only a matter of determining how much water to let in and developing a system to release that much water.